One of my biggest projects as a young journalist and my first as editor-in-chief of Central Michigan Life embarks early tomorrow afternoon: The redesign of cm-life.com, the Web site for the student newspaper at Central Michigan.
This is a project that has been in the talks for more than a year. We began thinking redesign sometime early 2008 in a move that would upgrade us from College Publisher 4.0 to 5.0. We went through personnel changes and standstills up until last January, when I assumed Online Editor duties. My main task was to redesign the site. I was trained on 5.0 and began working a design that, truthfully, looked pretty good.
But like many other campus newspapers in transition College Publisher, we ran into problems. I don’t necessarily blame College Publisher for them; they have been extremely helpful while we worked with them and certainly weren’t trying to make things difficult on us. But there were things we wanted with our new Web site that they just did not provide, especially on the multimedia and advertising side of things. We also saw our site, despite the additions I was making to it, becoming more and more outdated, causing us to lose our patience. We delayed our redesign and looked for alternatives.
Enter CoPress, a nonprofit of young journalists and tech enthusiasts who specialize in creating appealing student news sites through WordPress. After seeing what WordPress is capable of through sites such as The Miami Hurricane and The Mustang Daily, I felt like we found our match. We began talks in late spring and early summer with the full intention of signing on and beginning work as soon as possible.
That brings me to the present. I am receiving a WordPress orientation of sorts tomorrow afternoon so I can get started on the new site right away. The goal: To launch a completely new cm-life.com by August 20, in time for our first fall edition.
Obviously, this is not going to be easy. I’ll probably enlist the help of several coworkers and ask CoPress at least a dozen questions along the way. There is a lot to do to make this site as functional and as professional as I can. But it is a challenge I’m willing to accept, especially since I could not put something together in the spring.
What will this new Web site have? I’m not sure yet. I have a vision for it, but not a clue for how the finished product will look.
All I know is if you have been a regular visitor of cm-life.com, you will be amazed. Our readers are conditioned to read the Web site three times per week, the days we publish — we’re changing that. Our site will have fresh content every day of the week, no matter what. It will utilize the latest social networking tools and technologies to keep our audience coming back multiple times per day. It will run faster, look cleaner, navigate easier and flat-out work better in delivering Central Michigan news and content. Should everything go according to plan, it will be among the best student newspaper sites in the country in 2009-10.
Those are the things I can guarantee. The rest, we will see. Keep checking this blog for more updates regarding this venture – I will use it as a log, of sorts, to provide updates on what you will find on the new cm-life.com. I’m extremely excited to get to work on this, and I hope our regular readers are happy once we get this thing live.
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Posted by Brian Manzullo at July 29, 2009
Journalism, Updates